Watta "Kick" of a Stub Story

On Facebook, a friend of mine, posted an INXS video of “Don’t Change” the other day and that was what started me pulling out the ol’ box o’ ticket stubs. As I commented how their concert was in my top ten all time favorites and then a mutual friend stated he was at the same show and mentioned how Michael Hutchinson was walking on the edge of the orchestra pit making the security guard freak out and that flooded me with a bunch of memories. 

“Kick” came out in 1987 up until then they were somewhat obscure “New Wave” band if you can include riding “New Wave”s coat tails with “Common Wealth” countries. Obscure especially in Farmville Fort Wayne… “Kick” had only been out a very short time so they hadn’t entered the stratosphere of M-TV exposure yet when they announced they were coming to Fort Wayne, IN. And when I heard they were coming to the beautiful and amazing Embassy Theater I found out when tickets went on sale and early that morning went straight to the theater’s box-office. I was about 15th in-line, which turned into about 50 people before they started selling. One good thing about being in Farmville and not many knowing of INXS meant that it not being huge crowd they didn’t try breaking us up with a dumb lottery system or anything, and let us buy tickets with our original place in line. So my seats were 4th row.. font and center as they say….

Back to the Facebook thread another friend of mine posted he was also there and reminded me that The Brandos opened up, and were also an amazing band.(Sadly I see they aren’t represented on RP ) But anyway when INXS started not only was Hutchinson “walking on the banister of the pit” like the other guy mentioned, I was reminded he was gyrating, faux humping and otherwise humiliating the center guard relentlessly.

But here’s the thing….there were like 15 guards down along the front, as if they were expecting a riot. It was pretty much the first and last “rock” concert they had there at the beautiful ornate and apparently delicate Embassy Theater. And to their credit… it is a beautiful venue…. to say the least. I have several very interesting stories that I will tell in the future about the amazing beauty, and incredible acoustics, that many famous artists have enjoyed over the years. But in this case, the radical rock band from Australia had the authorities very antsy and they were out in force. Any time someone would stand up, they were asked to sit down, any attempt to head to front of the theater was quickly squelched etc.. Now they WERE reserved seats and losing my excellent choice seats to a crazy mob would have sucked, but not to be able to stand?… I don’t know this crowd would have stood the whole show for sure… and I suppose standing would have easily lead to rush to the stage too. But it really started making the INXS members angry and thus started the antics behind the middle guards head… this eventually lead to them completely stopping the show at least twice, and threatening to leave if the audience wasn’t allowed to have fun. At one point the saxophone player Kirk Pengilly started insulting Fort Wayne in general: “hick town” type of stuff, which Micheal did his best to apologize for, but despite all of this, it was still an awesome show and they did their best to thoroughly entertain the "suppressed" crowd, and I do think the last song or encore, maybe, did finally have a rush to the stage that had everyone standing. Me and my two friends, both hot girls, I might add, stayed in our perfectly fine area of the floor, and when they left the stage Jon Farniss tossed his drums sticks out into the crowd.. one of which hit the palm of my outstretched hand but striking it just so, that it spun around and continued on behind me onto some other lucky fan. Oh well.. great show anyway! {Sidenote: I’m not sure exactly what date this was… if you’ll notice the actually date is torn off the ticket. I have MANY tickets that are like this, especially from the stupid design of Sunshine Promotions and The Embassy. When I first thought of doing this book I even tried calling The Embassy to see if they might be able to help me research specific dates and such, but no one ever got back to me }

Since I first wrote this up I was able to find the date as October 21st, 1987 but no song actual set-list keep checking here as I created an empty one:

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/inxs/1987/embassy-theatre-fort-wayne-in-bdb6136.html

Here's a setlist from 8 days later probably similar.
Setlist from October 29, 1987 Albany, NY